Interviews

New York’s Isidore Quartet, winners of the renowned Banff International String Quartet Competition 2022 and the Avery Fisher Grant 2023, arrive in Montreal for the first time this weekend. As part of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival, the ensemble founded in 2019 will play three times: Friday the 16th at noon in Salle Bourgie in a short concert lasting less than an hour, Saturday the 17th evening in piano quintet format, where they will be accompanied by the excellent, and Montreal local, Philip Chiu, and Sunday afternoon at the Maison symphonique with an entire string ensemble featuring Tchaikovsky!

Made up of Phoenix Avalon and Adrian Steele on violins, Devon Moore on viola and Joshua McClendon on cello, the ensemble has developed a reputation for exciting, clear and sincere playing. They’re also said to make classical music sound totally fresh with a relaxed approach to concert-going.

Why Isidore? Firstly, in recognition of Isidore Cohen, violinist of the famous Juilliard Quartet, an ensemble that inspires them, and secondly, humbly confessed, as a tribute to the Greek monk Isidore, who is said to have concocted the first real vodka in the Grand Duchy of Russia. The pleasure of music doesn’t have to come alone!

A chat with Devon Moore.

Pan M 360: Hello! It’s a pleasure to know you’ll soon be in Montreal!

Devin Moore (Isidore 4t) : Thank you! It’s a great pleasure for us to go there for the first time as an ensemble. It’ll be a first for me, but not for Adrian (the violinist) as his brother lives there. 

Pan M 360: Banff and Avery Fisher are two very prestigious prizes. You were founded very recently (2019). Did you anticipate such a rapid rise when you started?

Devin Moore (Isidore 4t): No, we didn’t. We simply wanted to play music together in an official way because we were already doing it as students. When we applied to take part in the Banff Competition, we had no expectations. Then, when we were accepted in the competition, we realized that ”Oh, heck, we’ve got to learn a lot of music all of a sudden!” We had maybe five or six months of serious work as an ensemble, no more. So we worked very, very, very hard. It was a fantastic experience, very exciting, but perhaps the most stressful of my life!

Pan M 360: What does this First prize in Banff mean to you?

Devin Moore (Isidore 4t): It’s a big deal. Right after we played our program for the finals, a guy came and offered to represent us as an agent. We hadn’t yet received the announcement of victory. It was an exceptional contest. I remember admiring several of the quartets that took part (the Schumann, the Dover, etc.). The mere fact of being admitted was a great validation of our work and vision.

Pan M 360: On your website, you state that your mission is to “revisit, rediscover and reinvigorate” the repertoire. How do you go about this?

Devin Moore (Isidore 4t) : We’re inspired by the vision of the Juilliard Quartet, one of the great ensembles of the 20th century. Collectively, the four of us have studied with eight or nine current or former members of this quartet! Their philosophy has always been to treat the new as if it were old, and the old as if it were new. We like to treat the repertoire as if it were an open playing field. Take Haydn, for example, which we love. We take a very sincere but passionate approach. We love the great repertoire and, even though I’m the oldest, at 24, and even though I sometimes think we have no idea what we’re doing (laughs), we dive right in and express what we feel for this music, without filter, without restraint.

Pan M 360: The benefit of youth… Since you’re so young, how do you think you can convince people of your generation to come to classical concerts?

Devin Moore (Isidore 4t) : What we want most is to connect and communicate closely with audiences, young and old. Although we love to play in traditional concert halls, we also don’t hesitate to play in art galleries, or in other contexts where people may well be lying down or sitting on sofas, talking a bit during the concert, having a glass of wine, etc. These are contexts in which we can adapt very well. I think it allows us to reach a different, often younger, audience. We’ve been to concerts, we’ve learned to sit up straight, to be quiet, not to applaud between movements, but for many people it’s intimidating. But it’s not the manners that count, it’s the appreciation of the music!

Pan M 360: You are socially committed. You’re involved in a project called Music Heals Us. What is this initiative and why are you involved?

Devin Moore (Isidore 4t) : It’s a non-profit organization that brings music to people who don’t have access to it for all sorts of reasons. We go into hospices, health care centers, prisons and so on. It’s a program run by Molly Carr, the Juilliard Quartet’s current violist. She was my teacher and shortly after we formed as a professional ensemble, she contacted us to participate. In all honesty, it’s one of our favorite activities. They are simply unforgettable human experiences. I remember clearly one time, we went to give a concert in a prison in the Bronx. We arrive there with our instruments, set up and start playing. A few people approached, then several more and more again. They start asking us questions, and we start talking and chatting. And then this man comes along and tells us he writes rap lyrics, and asks if he can sing them for us. We went along with him, underscoring him with rythms, and it lasted about twenty minutes! It was one of the best experiences we’ve ever had. Winning a competition like Banff is fantastic and very important, but the primary aim of our passion is to create sincere contact with other people, and Music Heals Us gives us the opportunity to make human encounters of a totally different and deeply sincere nature, in totally unexpected contexts. It’s very powerful.

Pan M 360: You’re active on the contemporary music scene. Do you focus on any particular type of new music?

Devin Moore (Isidore 4t) : For my part, I started a non-profit organization with a colleague with the goal of playing more music by composers from groups underrepresented in classical music. For example, black composers, female composers or also works by artists from other musical genres, such as the string quartets of Billy Childs, a great jazz musician who has won several Grammy awards, but whose work in classical music is not well known. It’s extraordinary music. Every time we play it, people fall in love with it.

Pan M 360: Thank you very much, and we can’t wait to hear you in Montreal!

Devin Moore (Isidore 4t): Thank you very much, and we’re looking forward to it too!

A guest at Piknic Electronik on May 22nd as an opener for Deborah de Luca, Alexa Borzyk continues her ascent on the Montreal techno scene, and soon on the international scene. Why soon? Because her appearance at Parc-Jean-Drapeau was her last date before moving to Europe, to Berlin to be precise, for a year. Before settling down in the German capital, the DJ will have the chance to perform at Tomorrowland (Boom, Belgium) this summer, one of the biggest EDM festivals on the old continent.

With just a few days to go, PAN M 360 caught up with the Montreal producer to discuss her time at Piknic and the different facets of her career as an artist.

Photograph copyright : Kevin Millet

PAN M 360 : What was your experience at Piknic this year?

Alexa Borzyk : It was different from other years because I played a style that’s not what I’m used to, to adapt to the sound identity of the artists I was playing with. It was melodic techno, whereas I’m more on the techno side.

PAN M 360 : Does Piknic Electronik have any special significance for you?

Alexa Borzyk : Not only is this my third time DJing at Piknic, it’s also one of the first events I attended when I discovered the Montreal electronic scene.

PAN M 360 : Speaking of discovering the Montreal scene, have you always lived in Montreal?

Alexa Borzyk : I grew up in Montreal, having moved here when I was twelve. Before that, I spent my whole life in Quebec City.

PAN M 360 : Tell me about your musical background.

Alexa Borzyk : I started learning the violin at the age of 8, then I also played a bit of guitar when I was a teenager, around 15. I discovered electronic music around the age of 17 thanks to one of my best friends, who was a promoter in this field.

PAN M 360 : What inspired you to take the plunge and become a DJ and producer?

Alexa Borzyk : My friend was a promoter, but she was also a DJ and organized parties that I attended. That’s when I decided to teach myself how to mix. Production came a bit later. Before that, I was more involved in promoting and organizing techno events in Montreal. I’ve been active in production for about 3 years now.

PAN M 360 : Can you tell us more about the events you organized?

Alexa Borzyk : I organized my first event in 2018. It was a small party at the Blue Dog bar. Then I organized another event in collaboration with several collectives, called “Reflection”, which was a different concept in Montreal, it was done at Entrepôts Dominions in 2019, we invited Stéphanie Sykes for the occasion. Then I organized my second event at the end of 2019, with VTSS, at Livart, then I stopped.

PAN M 360 : Why didn’t you continue organizing events?

Alexa Borzyk : When I started out, I didn’t have much experience and I put a lot of pressure on myself, which was sometimes difficult to manage. When the pandemic hit, it also affected my priorities and what I really wanted to do. I had to deal with burnout and financial problems. I preferred to concentrate on production.

PAN M 360 : What about your work as a producer ?

Alexa Borzych : I spend a lot of my time at home producing. I work mainly digitally, with VSTs and samples on Ableton Live. I mainly produce techno, sometimes a bit of pop or hip-hop. I feel that to be creative I need to take a step aside and try to do something other than techno, it really feeds my creativity.

PAN M 360 : This summer you’ll be playing at Tomorrowland in Boom, Belgium, one of the biggest EDM festivals in Europe.

Alexa Borzych : Yes, it all started with the Coïncidence label, based in Belgium, to which I’m signed. I released my first EP, Under The Temple in 2022. I knew that Coïncidence had a stage at Tomorrowland, but I didn’t necessarily expect them to ask me to play there. It’s my first time playing outside Canada. I played Igloofest Québec and that’s the only time I’ve ever really left Montreal to play elsewhere.

PAN M 360 : You’re leaving Montreal to spend a year in Berlin. Do you think that leaving Montreal is a kind of obligatory step in developing a career?

Alexa Borzych : For me, honestly, I think it is. More generally, it’s also a way of encouraging people to realize their dreams. Elsewhere” is an asset, wherever you are in the world, in Montreal or not. For me, it’s a way of getting out of my bubble, of listening to what’s being done elsewhere, of discovering something else.

PAN M 360 : What are your plans for Europe?

Alexa Borzych : To look for a few more dates to play, but above all to take some time for myself and work on production.

PAN M 360 : Do you have any other releases in the pipeline?

Alexa Borzych : I’ve got a new EP called Fatale coming out on Coïncidence. It wasn’t planned, but it’s coming out on the day of my departure for Berlin, June 30th.

Shanta Nurullah has distinguished herself as a sitarist and bassist exploring African-American improvisational music throughout her career. A legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) member, Shanta will be performing with her trio at this year’s Suoni Per Il Popolo.

PAN M 360: Hi Shanta, looking forward to your Suoni show! Can you tell us a little bit more about the performance?

SHANTA NURULLAH: Oh, I’m very much looking forward to it as well. We’ll be doing a trio thing. I’ll be playing the sitar and a little bit of small percussion. I might bring a sansula, it’s a type of mbira or kalimba, but this particular one was actually made in Germany. It’s like a kalimba that’s mounted on a little drum, mounted on a membrane and a frame. I might play a little electric bass as well.

Alex Wing is coming with me, he’ll be playing electric guitar and an oud, which is a Middle Eastern instrument. Fred Jackson Jr. plays alto saxophone and might be playing some percussion as well. 

PAN M 360:  That’s a lot of “might”. Sounds like a lot is going to be left to the moment. 

SHANTA NURULLAH: Ha, yes. We’re going to improvise and perhaps play one or two compositions. And we might do some singing as well.

PAN M 360: Such is the nature of, of what shall we call this music exactly?

SHANTA NURULLAH: Creative music.

PAN M 360: Creative music, that’s it.  I would love to know about your relationship with the sitar. I’m sure you’ve got a story to tell. 

SHANTA NURULLAH: Well, when I was 19 years old, I went to India with a group of college students, and we each had a project that we were to research and study while we were there. And my project was to be about the untouchables. I had done all of my previous research on this group of people that had, in my mind, a plight that was very similar to that of my people, the African-Americans. But when we got to Pune, we were based at Deccan College, and we were being given all sorts of these cultural presentations. One of them was a concert, a sitar concert. And from the moment I first heard the instrument, I just fell in love with it. I told the director of the program, that is what I have to do. And he’s like, no, no, you came here to do this social science, political science project. And I’m like, no, no, no, this is what I have to do. 

So I found a teacher and he got me an instrument. I studied for about five months before I left.  I was able to get the basics of the instrument, you know, how to hold it, how to play it. I learned my Sa Re Ga Ma, you know, I learned the scale, and one raag, and he sent me on my way.  But he also had a beautiful sitar made for me while I was there. Before I left he took me to the village of Marashkar to pick up that sitar, it’s the one that I’m still playing.

And I wasn’t able to find a teacher when I came back to Chicago to continue my studies. Before I left India, there were these guys that basically hung out in my teacher’s studio and they kind of brushed me off and told me that you’ll never really be able to play this instrument, because you need to study at least for five years and play every day for eight hours a day. I took that to heart and basically just sat in my room and played it. Now, when I was sitting in my room just playing like that, I discovered that I could play some of the songs that I had grown up hearing, singing like, you know, Negro spirituals. Motherless Child, Wade in the Water. And that’s what I did in my room. I also had a Ruth Brown blues record and I would often play along with it. 

PAN M 360: Your music crosses so many boundaries and the sitar seems to be but a part of a much larger artistic vision. How did things begin to take shape?

SHANTA NURULLAH: At the same time I was a literature student, and I got so enamoured with the Black Arts Movement that when I finished my studies, I wanted to get involved. I wanted to be a part of the Black Arts Movement. That’s how I learned about the Kuumba workshop, which was headquartered at the Southside Community Arts Center, which was a hub that dated back to the 20s, 30s, 40s, and the years of the WPA and just had a long history of the arts in Chicago. The workshop met regularly and welcomed me into their theatre company. They had regular one-act plays they put on on Saturday night, after the play, they would have what they called a ritual. And the ritual was that every member of the company would come up and present something, a song or a poem or something, kind of like an open mic.

Well, one Monday evening after the rehearsal, I drove one of the company members home. I came into her house for a minute and noticed that in the corner of the room was a bass guitar. And I had never seen one before. I asked her if I could, if I could play it. I had never held a bass before let alone played one but once I began playing it, she was so amazed that she gave me the bass and the amp to take home. 

So all week long, I’m practicing on this bass, And I took it on Saturday night to Kuumba and played it at the ritual. You know, I was arrogant enough to think that just after one week, I was ready to play this instrument in public. So Val Gray Ward, the director of the company, after the ritual, she said, well, that was nice, but you know, you really do need some lessons. She suggested I see Pete Cosey. I didn’t know who he was but I went to see him. 

I later found out that Pete was the guitarist that put the electric in Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud album. He also played with Miles Davis, and was one of the regulars at Chess Records, so he was just a phenomenal musician. 

Ater a couple of bass lessons from Pete Cosey, he said, you know, you really need to go see Phil Cohran. Phil was one of the founders of the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and I stayed with him for almost four or five years. He had this thing called Black Music Workshop on Saturday morning. I took my bass to Phil and he said you’re welcome to join the workshop, but what other instruments do you play? I said, well, I have this sitar at home, but I can’t really play it because the people in India said that I have to study for five years and practice eight hours a day, so I can’t bring it out. He said, sister, that instrument’s from Africa, so are you. Bring it on over here. And that gave me permission to just stretch out and express myself, express myself. on the sitar and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

He wrote music for me and he wrote this harp and sitar duet that was just really beautiful. He wrote me a sitar blues and you know, it was just a wonderful experience learning from him, and that just launched me into my career, basically.

PAN M 360: I can’t help but think of Alice Coltrane when I hear about your music. Was she one of your influences? Are you on the same kind of quest as her?

SHANTA NURULLAH: Oh, absolutely. Alice Coltrane is one of my greatest inspirations. I had the honour of actually spending an afternoon with her. That was just one of the highlights of my entire life, getting to meet her and talk to her. It continues to inspire me. When I listen to her music, I’m hearing new things even now that I’ve never heard before. Her music speaks to universality, to love, to freedom. I’m a spirit musician like that, musicians who are, how can I say it, open to the energy of the universe, of the moment. I play what I feel and I play what I hear and mostly I like to play with other people and explore communication with other musicians. It’s creating, collective creation. 

PAN M 360: That’s creative music. Thanks a lot Shanta. 

SHANTA NURULLAH IS PERFORMING AT SUONI PER IL POPOLO, SALA ROSSA, ON WEDNESDAY JUNE 14. INFOS & TICKETS HERE

If you’re familiar with the music of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, you may have in mind the theme associated with the Riders of Rohan and occasionally played by a violin. Or at least, a particular violin. It’s the Hardanger fiddle, a traditional Norwegian instrument made of four “melodic” strings (like a classical violin) to which are added five “resonant” strings (known as sympathetic). Hence the buzzing effect that comes with playing this instrument.

On Friday June 16, as part of the Montréal Baroque 2023 Festival, Norwegian violinist Ragnhild Hemsing will present a highly original concert featuring the baroque violin alongside the traditional Hardanger fiddle in a programme featuring Handel, Lully, Marais, Nordic folk music and, yes, Vivaldi with a totally original version of his Four Seasons (played on, you guessed it, the Hardanger!).

I met the young artist and talked to her about this fascinating instrument, the concert programme and lots of other things.

Pan M 360: What role does the traditional violin play in Norwegian society?

Ragnhild Hemsing: It’s a tradition that’s still very much alive. A lot of students are learning this style of playing (because it’s not just about the particularity of the instrument, but the way it’s played), and there are a lot of festivals and events linked to traditional music. It’s also a very oral tradition, because you learn from the masters and from memory. 

Pan M 360: Is the playing technique radically different from that of the classical violin?

Ragnhild Hemsing: It’s completely different. I think I’m probably the only artist who plays both the traditional hardanger and the classical violin. It’s very difficult to tune, because with four basic strings and five sympathetic strings, there are 27 different ways of tuning the instrument. I’ll need to have several of them pre-tuned with me for the concert, otherwise it would take too long to re-tune between pieces! All these possibilities exist because each type of instrument tuning corresponds either to a regional musical background (one valley has its style, another village another), or to desired moods linked to certain times of the day (morning, afternoon, evening), or to a whole host of other factors. It’s a very rich and complex tradition. In general, a classical violinist cannot play the Hardanger, and vice versa. 

Pan M 360: How did you come to master this tradition, as well as that of academic classical music?

Ragnhild Hemsing: Traditional music is part of my roots. I started playing the Hardanger at the age of five. I come from the Valdres region, a very active centre for traditional music in Norway, where many traditional musicians come from. I went on to study and learn classical violin after that. I was very happy when I realised that I didn’t have to choose, and that I could simply do both. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Pan M 360: They are magnificent instruments, splendidly ornamented…

Ragnhild Hemsing: Yes, they are. Each maker has his own signature and style. My main instrument dates from 1867. The old instruments (because new ones are being made) had a dragon’s head on top of the instrument. This referred to a whole panorama of legends and myths associated with Norwegian pagan culture. And many pieces of folk music refer specifically to these stories. That’s why, for a very long time, it was forbidden to play Hardanger in churches. It was said to be the devil’s instrument! That’s no longer the case, of course…

Pan M 360: Are there any ‘classical’ pieces written for the Hardanger?

Ragnhild Hemsing: There aren’t many. To my knowledge, the first dates from 1905 and is by Johann Halvorsen. It’s a suite for Hardanger and orchestra. Later, another Norwegian composer, Geirr Tveitt, wrote some pieces, including two concertos. 

Pan M 360: You’ve just released an album featuring Tveitt’s Concerto No. 2 (for Hardanger), coupled with Bruch’s Concerto (for classical violin) ….

Ragnhild Hemsing: Yes. On the Berlin Classics label. I also play classical works arranged for the Hardanger, like Grieg for example. Or the Four Seasons! The people of Montreal will be the first in America to hear my nordic vision of Vivaldi. It will be very special.

Pan M 360: You’re also commissioning new pieces…

Ragnhild Hemsing: I’d really like to expand the ‘classical’ Hardanger repertoire. And I really enjoy taking this instrument to classical venues elsewhere in the world. 

Pan M 360: Next Friday’s concert will be a mix of Hardanger and classical. What have you prepared?

Ragnhild Hemsing: Yes, it’s going to be a very nice mix, I think. There will be a bit of everything we’ve been talking about: baroque with Handel, Vivaldi, Marais, etc., sometimes with Hardanger and sometimes with classical violin. I’ll also be presenting a contemporary piece by Agnes Ida Pettersen, for Hardanger and orchestra. I will be accompanied by the Barokkanerne ensemble and the Finnish Baroque Orchestra.

This year’s Festival Classica comes with a grand spectacle to celebrate fifty years of Pink Floyd’s seminal release, The Dark Side of the Moon. Under the direction of Simon Fournier, the Orchestre symphonique du Grand Montréal with the Chœur de l’Opéra Bouffe du Québec will present the album in its entirety, with visual accompaniment from VJ BunBun. I sat with Mr. Fournier to discuss what will surely be an epic performance. 

PAN M 360: Hi Simon, thank you for being here. Sounds like this is going to be a really really exciting show! Can you tell me a little bit more about how exactly Dark Side is going to be presented? 

Simon: Sure, the show is really a symphonic-rock concert, and the word rock is important there. Sometimes you see pop music that is orchestrated and rewritten for strictly a symphonic ensemble, an orchestra that is, and therefore some of the colours of the music are different. In our case, we have a band, a rock band plus the orchestra. 

In effect, we could keep the musicians of the orchestra completely silent, and you would still have the song there, you know, the guitarist, the keyboards, they’re playing exactly the parts that Pink Floyd played except now we have the possibility to have all sorts of extra textures and timbres from the orchestra. We are building layers on top of the songs. 

PAN M 360: What was the process of the orchestration like? 

Simon: Well the first time I did something like this was with Classica in 2017, with some Beatles repertoire. Back then it was then the fifty years of Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Marc Boucher, who is the director of the festival, when he contacted me, he said ‘Simon, what I need from you is to think as if George Martin had an orchestra available to him whenever he wanted’. So that’s what I did, I tried to get into his head and understand how he works, and how he works with the orchestra especially. That’s what we’re doing with Pink Floyd here. This obviously demands that before writing any extra notes, you must listen to a lot of Pink Floyd and start to live in the world they inhabit. It can take many weeks before I write one note. So I really approach it as if I’m in the studio with them in 1973. That’s what I did. That’s what Peter Brennan, who also does most of the orchestrations, did.

PAN M 360: And so can we expect any surprises?

Simon: The surprise might be mostly coming from the choir, because the choir is singing most of the melodies.There’s some counterpoint in those parts, I don’t want to be too technical, but we take, let’s say, a piece of a melody from the song and we develop it within the choir. So you can kind of hear these fragments of melodies in the different voices that really create some very seductive colours. The choir gives a nocturnal quality to these songs, it feels almost like we are all by a fire at night. We’re in a very ethereal world and close to the world of dreams, you know, that’s what Pink Floyd is all about. 

Of course we have Lulu Hughes as our soloist and it’s no surprise that she’ll be singing ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. She does it marvellously, she’s perfect for that, and she’s a big fan of Pink Floyd. Where it’s mostly Lulu doing the solos, the choir will change its role to be a bit more like a conventional choir or back-up singers. Sometimes I ask them to sound really like they are in a cathedral, almost like a sacred music choir, and sometimes I ask them, hey, use your real pop voice, your rock and roll voice, depending on the song. 

When the whole choir is adding just some ‘ahs’ in the background, it’s really opens up the sound and and we did a similar thing once before for a Queen show not so long ago and I remember being with the sound man when he was turning up the choir a bit in the mix and I was getting goosebumps. I had a good conversation with the sound man, Guillaume, yesterday on the phone, about how we want to spread out the choir and yeah, he’s an expert of Pink Floyd.

PAN M 360: I would love to know about your relationship with this repertoire?

Simon: Even though I’m doing a lot of classical and contemporary music, my career is all around classical music, my first amour, my first love, was with rock. So for me it’s still a repertoire that I know and connect with all these years later. I remember Dark Side of the Moon when I was a child. I listened to it maybe four years after, when I was 13 years old. My older sister listened to it. My friends, their older brothers and their friends listened to it. I remember putting the vinyl on and listening to it a lot. But then it was natural. We were in the era of prog music. I listened to a lot of Pink Floyd, Genesis and Gentle Giant. I was a big fan of Led Zeppelin too. So, you know, it’s been around all my life.

Lulu Hughes told me she was a huge Pink Floyd fan and that she especially loves The Wall, that she knows all the songs, all the words by heart. In this concert we perform some songs from The Wall as well, and we chose songs that Lulu was especially comfortable to interpret and sing. But we’re also aware that this is a show for everyone and not only for big Pink Floyd fans, but for everyone gathering outside with us, you know in the big park where people will picnic, so we want to make something for everyone to enjoy. 

PAN M 360: I’m sure everyone will. I think the fact that Classica puts on such concerts is really great. It exposes a wider audience both to classical music and to great rock music from the past.

Simon: Exactly. That was one of the reasons that Marc Boucher puts on this show, to stop creating cases for different genres, you know, to make something we can all appreciate. One day, I work on Pink Floyd and the next week I work on an operetta from Jacques Offenbach. To me there’s only good and bad music and I like to do good music, which includes so many genres. I think we’re seeing that sort of thing more and more, musicians being more open to different styles and cultures of music. 

Hailing from the northern capital of Reykjavik, the young pianist/composer Gabríel Ólafs has emerged as a rising star in the contemporary classical music scene. For his latest release out on June 9, Lullabies for Piano and Cello, Ólafs continues in his established trajectory of crafting thoroughly evocative and nostalgic soundworlds, this time partnering with Steiney Sigurðardóttir to bring to life old Viking lullabies.

PAN M 360: Being from Iceland is quite a significant part of your artistic identity, and it seems to be for other artists who come from there. For those of us who don’t know too much about Iceland, what does it mean to be Icelandic?

Gabríel: I mean it depends on who you ask, for some artists from Iceland I would say they don’t necessarily make it a large part of their creative direction but I sort of coincidentally have in my projects. My first album with Universal was based on Icelandic poetry, which is a big part of talking about Iceland, especially culturally. The art of writing is a huge, huge thing here, ever since the Vikings, who used to write a lot of poetry and stories. Storytelling is something that’s very quintessentially Icelandic. And then this new album, Lullabies, that’s coming out very soon, is very much about our heritage and exploring the storytelling aspect of being Icelandic.

Folk songs are sort of our biggest musical legacy. Because music isn’t actually a huge tradition in Iceland through the ages, weirdly enough, you know, compared to how many people live here, there’s only like 300,000 of us. Still, you have a lot of musicians, local musicians, and then also the ones that have been doing music globally like Sigur Rós, Björk, Johan Johansson, or Hildur Guðnadóttir the composer. 

PAN M 360: And so what kind of stories did the Vikings like to share?

Gabríel: I would say sort of the most important piece of Icelandic storytelling would be what we call the Sagas – stories that are sometimes about sort of heroism, you know, Icelandic Vikings going abroad, going to Britain, to Eastern and Western Europe, even as far as like at the time Constantinople and Russia. Even America as well, you know, the Vikings “discovered” it before Columbus, and Canada, especially. There’s a big connection between Canada and Iceland. The Vikings were explorers and so it’s not only just storytelling, it’s also they were big documenters.

PAN M 360: Isn’t Iceland one of the few countries where the language has remained more or less the same since it was settled? 

Gabríel: I really like to tell people that don’t know that. I think it’s a huge flex, because it’s almost like being in like Italy, or Spain, speaking perfect fluent Latin. Yeah, so you can pick up a book, like the sagas, and you can read it just like it was written today or something. Because it’s an island, we can thank our seclusion for it. In Denmark, Norway, Sweden, for example, they’ve been influenced by other Germanic languages. We still speak the Viking language, I think it’s very cool.

PAN M 360: So how did you go about getting a sense of what old Viking music was like?

Gabríel: Yeah, so that’s the thing. I really wish there was a bigger musical heritage here like other countries where you have like huge musical roots and resources. Iceland has very very little in terms of that and it seems that the Vikings, at least the Icelandic Vikings, weren’t big musicians. Well they would sort of sing and chant which was a big thing to be able to tell stories. 

The melodies that I found are an amazing thing because they are pretty much one of the few if not the only document we have where these sort of really old folk melodies are archived. And it’s just thanks to this one guy, I think he may have been a priest. About 200 years ago, he went to collect these melodies that didn’t exist on paper anywhere and he had learned how to write music. He went to each part of Iceland, documented the most popular melodies he found. And these melodies were passed down just from memory, especially lullabies – you would sing to your child and the child would remember and then sing to their child. And that’s how it was passed on. But these melodies would be largely lost if they weren’t for this collection. I was really intrigued by that.

PAN M 360: And what did you notice about these melodies? Were there some patterns that stood out?

Gabríel: Yes, there were a couple of themes. Most of them were simple, quite simple, harmonically very simple, I would say. And most of them were quite catchy, which I think is interesting. It’s like if you write a pop song today, you need it to be catchy to catch on, right? But you need to take it to another level of catchyness if you want it to survive hundreds of years, right? Many of these melodies didn’t make the cut and these were just like the pop hits, if you will, to sing in your home for your kids and family, you know?

They also had some sort of emotion, some beauty to them, and they all had a certain, and maybe this is just how we feel now, but there’s a certain eeriness to them. They weren’t all completely cute, you know what I mean? Especially the lyrics, and though I cut the lyrics because I’m sort of transforming them and rearranging them as an instrumental work, but many of the lyrics can be quite spooky. It’s like you’re singing to your child, it starts off fine and then it’s like just going to sleep because there’s a face on your window.

PAN M 360: Ha, I feel like that’s quite common across many cultures. I noticed too that a lot of the compositions here had a sort of dorian flavour to them. 

Gabríel: I have to admit that some of these, like more than half of those compositions, were composed by me. So that’s partly my fault because I also wanted to sort of put in my own sort of influence, which was really fantasy music. I’ve been into fantasy ever since I was a kid and I guess I’m that generation exposed to a huge wave of fantasy with, you know, seeing the Lord of the Rings, playing fantasy video games, and I collected like small little knights and vikings. I sort of noticed there was very little overlap and I actually haven’t talked about this anywhere, between classical musicians and fantasy fans like myself. And I would say the only overlap that happens is maybe Howard Shore with the Lord of the Rings score, where it’s obviously a brilliant composer developing that fantasy sound very heavily. And I thought to myself that I should really sneak some fantasy elements into this, so that’s also why the Dorian mode is very much there, that sense of adventure. 

PAN M 360: With this release you went for piano and cello,  and I just wanted to ask, what spoke to you about this specific instrumentation for this music?

Gabríel:  I just finished an album where I was trying to expand my sonic palette. I had done strings and piano first and then I did an album called Solon Islandus which was for me an experiment of trying different things like different sort of ensemble sizes and it was first sort of choral work. For my new album with Decca, I went back to the drawing board and I thought like I really want to just go into something at the root of music without any bells and whistles. Piano is my first instrument and I feel like I can have a very sort of immediate emotional connection to that. Then I thought about my second favourite instrument, which is the cello, which I thought was really important for this album because I am an instrumental composer.

I really love instrumental music because when you have lyrics, you’re saying something directly and the emotional value of the song is affected by the words. I like that about my type of music, which is without words, that you can have more of a subtle thing going on. It’s less telling the listener what to think and being more open to their interpretation of the music. I didn’t want any lyrics, but the cello has a very vocal quality, a very sort of singing quality, and you can sort of capture the same effect as when you have a singer. So there’s no emotional quality that’s lost, I feel. And I also just love this cellist, she is my really good friend. 

PAN M 360: Can you share a bit about what it’s like to be a young artist in Iceland today? 

Gabríel: So there’s a really powerful musical scene in Iceland and the musical scene here is very diverse. There’s a lot of pop music, especially made for the local market, which I know sounds crazy because it’s so small, but there’s a lot of it, and I have many friends that make pop music only for Iceland – it’s in Icelandic and it’s on the radio. And then you have a very strong experimental scene as well. Experimentalism is very intertwined with the Icelandic sound. You have artists like Björk, who is very experimental pop, then you have people like Johan Johansson and Sigur Rós really doing something experimental with post-rock. I would say like in terms of my friends here in the music scene I’m a little bit different because I am taking a more traditionalist approach. I am trying to say something new, but for some reason as an artist right now, I am quite into using a language that already exists. I think if you are good enough at writing melodies and creating music, you can do something new with the tools that already exist, that challenge is what fascinates me. 

I’m not saying that maybe down the line I won’t love to experiment even more with my sound palette, but for now I am a little bit out of the group here because I’m working with piano and cello instead of banging drums inside a helicopter or something haha. 

PAN M 360: At least not yet! 

Gabríel: Yeah, that’s later, maybe! 

PAN M 360: I look forward to it regardless. Thank you Gabríel, all the best. 

This Sunday at the Sala Rossa, this Suoni per il Popolo regular plans to explore every nook and cranny of the naked guitar, with no artifice except his own gestures on the metal strings.

Here, he explains his approach to PAN M 360, to prepare us for this encounter with his audience in the context of a triple programTransplanted to Holland over three decades ago, Scottish guitarist Andy Moor began his musical journey in Edinburgh, notably with Dog Faced Hermans, a post-punk band steeped in traditional music and free improvisation. At the turn of the ’90s, he was recruited by the Dutch band The Ex, famous for their mixtures of hardcor punk, free improvisation and unprecedented sound experiments. In 1995, alongside The Ex, he founded Kletka Red, alongside Tony Buck Joe Williamson and Leonid Soybelman, this time hybridizing traditional klezmer, Greek and Russian music.

Over the years, he has collaborated with many musicians from different horizons. A seasoned improviser, he returns to Suoni per il Popolo to play like one man with his guitar, in a program shared with Chicago experimental and multidisciplinary artist Damon Locks and Montreal improviser Markus Floats.

PAN M 360: What kind of performance are we talking about this time in Montreal?

ANDY MOOR: I’m actually coming to play solo, an approach I’ve developed over the last two or three years: improvising on guitar, just on guitar. There are no effects or anything.

PAN M 360: No electronic filters? No effects? Just a guitar without pedals? Can you give us some clues?

ANDY MOOR: When I first started playing guitar, I sometimes used an echo box. It could also have been a tape recorder – a tape that ran in circles, creating an echo effect. But after a while, when I listened to the recordings again, I always found that it had a nice effect, but you lost the presence of the guitar sound, which became a little fuzzy, a little soft. So this effects-free approach grew over time.

PAN M 360: Have you ever used effects pedals or other electro-acoustic filters?

ANDY MOOR: I never used effects pedals, maybe a little distortion back in the day. But there came a time when I thought I really didn’t need any extra effects. However, when I listen to other guitarists playing with effects, sometimes I like it. But most of the time, I get the impression that there’s some kind of filter or wall between the effects and the actual sound of their instrument.

Very often, guitarists use 10, 15 or 20 pedals. Yes, of course, once their sound has gone through all that, I don’t know, it ends up losing presence and dynamics. And it becomes a bit of a mush in some cases, whereas in other cases, some people manage to use the pedals well. Not really my taste. For me, at least, it feels like I’m losing more than I’m gaining. So instead of using pedals, I use objects to create unusual sounds on the strings.

PAN M 360: Do you see a lot of possibilities?

ANDY MOOR: It’s amazing the amount of sounds you can produce this way. To this day, I’m still surprised by some of the sounds that come out of the instrument. To bring out these sounds, I use a kind of preamplifier that slowly compresses the sound, so that the smallest change or movement can be heard very, very clearly. It also makes the body of the guitar react, if you touch it anywhere. Yes, I work a lot with low frequencies, re-tuning the strings very low. And really strange things happen when you do that, because the sound remains very present and very clear. You can really see and hear what’s going on.

PAN M 360: When you retune the instrument, is it a microtonal exploration, i.e. are you looking for other types of intervals than the “normal” scales?

ANDY MOOR: It’s very microtonal indeed. I don’t tune precisely, I go by ear, and I work primarily with the sound of the instrument.

PAN M 360: Are there any other reasons for excluding effects via pedals or other electronic tools?

ANDY MOOR: Part of the reason may lie in my playing style in the bands I’ve been involved with, which is very rhythmic guitar. There are no guitar solos in The Ex, for example, there may be the simple melody of a theme, but nothing more. The guitar’s rhythm accompanies that of the drums, and the two instruments sort of cross paths. So we’ve never really felt the need to do more than that. It’s just a question of simplicity, not purism. Everyone in the band has a simple element to produce. In a way, that’s what makes it all work.

PAN M 360: It’s interesting: part of your personality aims to keep things simple, but at the same time, you know, you explore complexity in other musical dimensions of your expression. Not many artists maintain this tension between simplicity and exploration.

ANDY MOOR: Yes, that’s true, but the addition of simple lines can produce something complicated because there are five of us working simultaneously. And the way it locks in at the end can sometimes generate very strange polyrhythmic discourses, because it’s not composed by one person. It’s all our ideas in one poem. And that’s, that’s what makes it so exciting.

PAN M 360: Sunday night’s program also features a duet with Damon Locks.

ANDY MOOR: Actually, I’m playing solo, but we’re also going to be doing a kind of collaboration. I’ve known Damon since the ’90s, when we toured together with a band called Trenchmouth, Damon Locks was the lead singer.

PAN M 360: More on Sunday night!

PRESENTED BY SUONI PER IL POPOLO, ANDY MOOR IS PERFORMING AT SALA ROSSA, SUNDAY JUNE 4, 9 PM. INFOS + TICKETS HERE

Following the release of ‘Tournée Nationale’, a mini-film documenting their tour with fellow DIY compatriots ARRETCOURT, I met with Oscar, Marlie, and Vincent from STAIRS to talk about their tour, their music, and to learn about the trials and tribulations facing up and coming bands in Montreal today. 

PAN M 360: Hey thanks for taking the time! Tell me a little more about the tour. 

Oscar: Yeah sure. It was the first tour for us and another band called ARRETCOURT. Together we drove across Quebec for 8 days, played in a few different towns, and we called it the ‘Tournée Nationale’. 

Vincent: Yeah that was sort of the theme of the tour and it gave us a reason to do a double tour, there’s lots of people around us who do that to save money in cars and we used all the same gear. The other band are a bunch of friends of ours before we were even making music.

PAN M 360: And did you find it was worth it? 

Vincent: Yeah, for sure for the fun and the experience of it all.  It was amazing to play in places like Tadoussac, which I didn’t really know, but we don’t get paid much. Well sometimes even barely get paid. 

Oscar: Yeah, but we managed to stay in the green and that was kind of a surprise. Well with tours in general you don’t make much money but we managed to like reduce costs. We made the most money in Montreal on our second show and practically paid for the rest of the tour with it. And squeezed into two cars, the eight of us, nine actually. 

Marlie: But in between shows we would get the chance to stop at really nice places. We went swimming along the way and we did just like a lot of fun stuff.  We met some really cool artists like Confiture Maison, which is a really cool band in Rimouski. They started Bain Publique, which is a solid and spectacular new venue there.

PAN M 360: In 2023 with all the ways people consume music nowadays, do you think touring is still kind of the purest way of getting your music across?

Oscar: Well there is such a tradition to it. But it is very resource consuming and it’s not the most ecological thing to do. Being in Montreal, we see a lot of people who come here on tour and from far it doesn’t seem to reach as much. Anyone with a bit of resources can tour and book a small thing but the impact is hard to predict. 

Vincent: I find that is really authentic. Just going to a place you don’t know, hoping people will come to see your show. Already in Montreal it’s really fun for me when someone comes to me and says ‘oh I didn’t know your band and I came to see the show’ and that’s why I think it’s pure, hoping people will come even if they don’t know you, like that’s what you’re there for.

Marlie:  Yeah, there’s a really special feeling of having strangers in the crowd really vibing to your music. You make a true connection with that person. It’s less quantity, but it’s quality relationships when it’s someone who discovers your music and likes it without knowing everything that surrounds it. 

PAN M 360: Is STAIRS a live band as much as a studio band?

Oscar: Definitely. We kind of have two separate approaches though. It’s lots of experimentation but once we get in the studio, we’re trying to rethink the songs and the arrangements. 

Marlie: Yeah. The parts don’t stay the way they are played live. The drums have a lot of different parts, different layers, especially the stuff on our new record which isn’t out yet.

Vincent: We tend to let the songs open, and when we play live we try to change the set every time, rethink things for what feels right, that’s what we did during the tour.

Marlie: And we have these open interludes that are like never really written, so when we play a lot, like during the tour, sometimes we end up changing everything. The parts are just so open like that.  No one’s waiting for someone to play that riff to start this section, you know. There’s no cues like that. 

Oscar: Yeah, it’s also like a Frank Zappa thing. He is a very technical composer and opens up these huge spaces. We’re not as extreme as that and we’re not Frank Zappa, but having these open space where there’s a huge risk, we do it in one of our songs,  “You can only make one dot at a time”, once we get to a certain part I have to think of a new bassline. And the music has to be interacting with how the crowd is feeling. If everyone’s like tired we will go soft and if people are really partying, then it becomes more of a rock show. 

PAN M 360: Your tour was called the Tournée Nationale. As a band that sings in English in Quebec, do you notice the language politics in the music scene?

Oscar: Inside Montreal there’s this huge thing between the French and the English, musically, which is weird. Even for instrumental music for jazz you have separate bars, playing the same standards, with no lyrics. Yeah. We have friends who go to Quai des Brume like five times a week and they don’t know Casa del Popolo exists and vice versa.  So I find it very important to mix those two. 

Vincent: It’s two different scenes with different styles of approaching the music. Because I’m mainly a French speaker, I do music mainly in French but in English too and nowadays we’re getting in the scene of like, more English speakers that come from Canada to come do a little tour in Quebec. So we meet those people, but like there’s a gap.

Marlie: Yeah but still there’s something, I imagine, very French and Quebecois in our music, even though we speak English, just because our influences musically, instrumentally, are also francophone and Quebecois. The lyrics are written in English but the music comes from everywhere. 

Oscar: I think the production on our new album might have more of a francophone production style. I have that feeling that there’s a way to mix for francophone pop that’s different from other English music, which is interesting to say. 

PAN M 360:  How do you describe your music then?

Vincent: No one knows. Yeah. You know, it was always evolving but we use now, when we are applying for stuff, we say something along the lines of, ‘pop, indie, psychedelic, rock’. 

Oscar: Something like that, but there’s soul in there too. Especially our last album.

Marlie: Yeah yeah, there’s funk, there’s groove.

Oscar: But funk is like a bad word right now. So we don’t say it too much, because we’re not exactly funk-rock you know. The new album definitely takes on some new influences of post-punk, new-wave, like Talking Heads.

PAN M 360: Aside from the next album, any future plans for STAIRS?

Oscar: Yeah, so July 29th, we’re playing with Glutenhead and Holly McLaughlin from Toronto. They’re putting out a single on that day, a really interesting band that’s kind of like midwest emo mixed with psychedelic rock. We will start playing more shows in the fall for sure. We’re recording over the summer, we should be done by the end of the summer. 

Vincent: Yeah. And we’d  like to film or video clips to the for the next album to have more funny stuff for people to watch 

Marlie: And we want to play outside of Quebec!

PAN M 360: 2023 is really a crazy time to be making art of any sort it seems. Are you optimistic about or pessimistic about the state of the industry?

Oscar: I mean there’s something optimistic about the industry failing right now? Yeah about it all falling down. But I don’t know, it’s hard to say. 

Vincent: I don’t feel very optimistic because it’s really hard work for not a lot of rewards but we get the rewards otherwise, spiritually, so yeah. It’s the community thing. 

Marlie: We’re a band but we’re also building it like a philosophy behind it where like, it’s our way of seeing life and you know, working together.

Oscar:  That’s what I like with this band especially. It’s working together with people and just building something that you love together. You know Marlie is my sister, Vincent and I have been friends since we were six years old. I have known Zak since the beginning of high school, so like we’re big friends. It’s just like having a community garden or something where we’re not trying to make huge crops to sell but just having something wholesome, nourishing, to offer. Yeah, it’s coming, it’s going and yeah, we can feed off our own garden.

The gesture is described as “living”, “non-linear”, “restorative”, “transformative” and “creative”.

Julie Richard’s ambitious Black Ark project aims to reconstruct fragments of compositions by female musicians of African descent, most of whom lived in the United States a century ago. Not only does Black Ark endeavor to find and show, but it also undertakes initiatives to re-actualize and revalue.

Despite their double oppression – as women and as blacks at a time of heavy racial segregation and widespread sexism of all races – African-American women composers had nonetheless attempted to impose their own vision and sensibility. Julie Richard is one of those who is striving to inscribe them once and for all in the great history of music.

Given the poor and difficult conditions of creation at the time, the works unearthed may have been broken down over time, as well as being forgotten. Blak Ark’s work necessarily becomes a “conversation” with what remains of these works, the outcome of which is to restore them to their rightful place and coherence.

In this way, Blak Art becomes Orchestra and bears witness to this reconstitution. Recorded in different locations and with different sections of the ensemble conducted by Julie Richard, this performance, captured in audiovisual format, brings to light a score that will find its audience once again.

This is a work by Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977), composer, writer, intellectual, theaterwoman, civil rights activist, true pioneer. The work in question is her 1932 three-act opera “Tom-Toms: An Epic of Music and the Negro”. Its reconstruction is the subject of a film, some excerpts of which will be “augmented” on stage by certain interventions directed by Julie Richard.

It makes perfect sense: this year, isn’t Suoni per il Popolo programmed by a team composed essentially of women, something absolutely unique in Montreal’s musical ecosystem? Julie Richard is one of the programmers of this festival, which is very much in line with PAN M 360’s values of extreme eclecticism, from hardcore punk to contemporary written music.

Musician, composer, multidisciplinary artist and cultural animator, Julie Richard has been active on the Montreal scene for some twenty years. Her interests include jazz, pop, experimental music and music of African, Gypsy, Jewish and Creole descent, to name but a few.

We really look forward to a conversation with Julie Richard!

PAN M 360 :What was the original motivation behind Blak Ark?

JULIE RICHARD: About eight years ago, I decided to undertake a search for archives on African and American women composers of classical music, because I thought it was suspicious that there weren’t any… when in fact there were. One thing led to another, and I found pieces that were never finished, and then I heard the rumor of this score by Shirley Graham Du Bois. When I came across this woman’s portrait, I said to myself “I absolutely must make this piece my own”.

PAN M 360: How did you come across her?

JULIE RICHARD: In New Orleans, I’d been talking to the manager of the university bookstore, and she said, “Listen, it would be interesting for you to contact the Harvard University bookstore, because they have a handwritten score of Shirley Graham’s opera Tom-Toms.” I finally contacted the bookseller there, and he sent me what he had.

PAN M 360: Did Shirley Graham compose a lot?

JULIE RICHARD: Very little, in fact. Her musical career came to an abrupt end. Basically, she wrote for the theater, and also wrote librettos for opera. But she was disillusioned by the impact of music on social phenomena. So she decided to devote herself more to literature than to theater and music.

PAN M 360: So let’s focus on Tom-Toms. How was this work reconstructed? What did you do with this handwritten score?

JULIE RICHARD: I studied the score, researched what we’d done and saw that there were people who’d already worked on it. I then eliminated all the sections that had already been presented and concentrated on what I felt needed to be rearranged and completed, because I probably didn’t have the latest version of this work. I then concentrated on the movements that nobody had redone, i.e. all those movements that were perhaps too technically demanding.

So I redid the orchestration from a basic score and handwritten notes, things like “there’s a clarinet here”. It was still pretty basic, but it’s a classical work. You could intuitively imagine what could be added.

PAN M 360: So you made your own extrapolation!

JULIE RICHARD: Absolutely. Olivier Saint Pierre contributed to the arrangements. I also made arrangements by hand, which were transcribed by copyists Brigitte Dajczer and Tim S. Savard.

PAN M 360: How many artists are involved in the execution?

JULIE RICHARD: We have a 48-piece orchestra, an 11-voice choir, 2 soloists and 5 dancers. In all, 75 people were mobilized for this production.

PAN M 360: It’s a big deal! How did you manage to finance it?

JULIE RICHARD: I got a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts during the pandemic, to make a recording. That’s why we’re first presenting this performance in a short film. For the moment, it’s absolutely impossible to present it on stage, given the amount of money required to do so. In fact, we had to record the work in different sections in different venues – Ausgang Plaza, Maison de la culture Saint-Laurent, Black Theatre Workshop. For Saturday’s event at the Sala, I chose to perform certain segments on stage to augment the film projection.

PAN M 360: How is the work presented?

JULIE RICHARD: It’s all about ritual music, with drums talking to each other, drawing people’s attention to a great tragedy in progress. Another part of the opera is based on spirituals. Questions are raised by the composer: “What are we doing? To what extent have we lost our references? Should we go back to Africa? There’s the concept of pan-Africanism, of which Shirley Graham was a subtle activist.

PAN M 360: Are you in charge of the location recordings?

JULIE RICHARD: Yes, I’m a conductor. I didn’t study conducting, but I’ve been conducting since I was 12, when I was in the bugle and drum corps. After that, I studied classical music and opera singing.

PAN M 360: Is the music performed by classical musicians?

JULIE RICHARD: They’re not artists we’re used to seeing in this type of production. Many of them have had a classical education, but are also associated with other musical forms such as soul and hip-hop. It’s great that they have the opportunity to express themselves in such a context.

PAN M 360: The Suoni context, of course!

LES ANGLES MORTES, BLAK ARK ORCHESTRA AND DJ SET D’ANDY MOOR, SATURDAY JUNE 3, 9 PM SALA ROSSA, PRESENTED BY SUONI PER IL POPOLO. INFOS & TICKERS HERE

Loig Morin is an atypical case of French chanson in North America. Born in Brittany, he left France with his wife and twins to settle in British Columbia… and make a songwriter career in French! Since his arrival on the West Coast, he has been a teacher and producer, as well as leading an artistic career whose latest offspring is this recording, released at the end of May, Adieu Hiver, the third part of a tetralogy based on the artist’s moods and experiences over the course of the four seasons.

These include Printemps (2021), Automne (2021) and Adieu hiver (2023), not to mention Lonsdale (2012), La rivière (2018) and Citadelle (2019). These recordings reveal Loig Morin’s undoubted ability to make fine songs, coupled with a musical eclecticism that has led him to rock, synthwave, electro-pop, electro-rock, certain Americana inclinations and more.

Since his prolificacy is inversely proportional to how well known he is in Eastern Canada, let’s reverse the process with this first PAN M 360 interview.

PAN M 360: Let’s get to know each other! So you’re Breton, French and Canadian.

LOIG MORIN: I come from the small island of Groix, just off Lorient in Brittany. My parents are Bretons. After that, I grew up in the Lyon region.

PAN M 360: You do have a Breton first name.

LOIG MORIN: It means glory and battle. With a first name like that…

PAN M 360: It puts a lot of pressure on you!

LOIG MORIN: Ha ha!

PAN M 360: And so you landed in British Columbia.

LOIG MORIN: That was in 2010. In fact, my wife is Moroccan, and we couldn’t see ourselves living in a context (often xenophobic) where she couldn’t emancipate herself professionally in France (she works in IT), so we decided to go and live elsewhere. So we applied to immigrate, and ended up with an opportunity in British Columbia. We’ve stayed there ever since, because we really fell in love. We lived in North Vancouver for a long time, and now we’re based on the Sunshine Coast, in Gibsons (north-west of Vancouver). Like Groix Island, you have to take a ferry to get there! Vancouver is a city that had so much success with the Olympic Games, it had become far too expensive and there’s now a Swiss feel to it – you’re not allowed to do this or that… But when you go to the Sunshine Coast, you find that adventurous spirit where things are allowed, and there are fewer people. We really like it there.

PAN M 360: So you’ve kept your family intact by making music, which is a feat in itself!

LOIG MORIN: When we arrived in British Columbia, I did a bit of odd jobs, and then I was offered a job as a music teacher at the French school. So I did that for two years, taking advantage of the space and facilities as well as giving music lessons. Then I stopped teaching and set up my own studio (Music Lab) where I regularly welcomed young and old to learn how to create songs. So I recorded several albums by local artists, and released albums myself.

PAN M 360: You had already done this in France before emigrating, hadn’t you?

LOIG MORIN: Yes, but the albums I made there were withdrawn from circulation. When I was 18, in fact, I left school and met the singer / songwriter William Sheller, who signed me for three albums on his own label. I then did a lot of rock and then had children after meeting my wife, who had come from Morocco to study in France. When we had the twins, I stopped music for a couple of years and then we decided to leave France.

PAN M 360: A few years and a few albums later, it’s time for “Adieu hiver”, the third in a series of four seasons.

LOIG MORIN: This time, I really came up with the idea of doing summer songs in winter, while retaining the sharp, metallic edge of winter… Why? Because I couldn’t quite decide if it was the right season… Really winter? It became clearer as I went along. So here we have these summer songs created in winter, which allowed me to explore electronic music a little further, without leaving the song format. The next album will be either “Été” avec chansons or another album where the song format will no longer predominate. En pente douce, I’m planning to move away from the song format.

PAN M 360: Let’s talk about the lyrics on Adieu hiver, which are all well written. William Sheller did take ou for the good reasons !

LOIG MORIN: Thanks. So, it starts with the first song,” Top Model”; there’s the sun, the coldness of our times, that of Hollywood stars who express nothing, there’s that North American coldness, there’s that “summer under the snow” where I make fun of the United States a little, particularly Texas.

Then, the song “Américaine” evokes those people who decide to stop answering their interlocutor when they lose interest in them.

Then there’s “Maria”, about a woman who leaves to commit suicide in a crazy town called Wallace (Idaho), where there are only antique dealers. I visited this surreal place where people seem never to have left home. This completely lost town, out of time, inspired me.

And then there’s “Avalanche”, about people who want to do things to get out of their imprisonment, who want to live an exciting existence, and who ultimately can’t because their habits are too strong. There’s a lot of talk about it, but it’s all in the words. You keep replaying the images that make you think of what you’d like to do, but you can’t because you’re buried under an avalanche of obligations and social constraints that prevent you from doing what you dream of. You want to get out of this winter of difficulties, and the avalanche brings you back under every time.

After that, I really went for the synths on “Adieu hiver”. We go for the warmth, but there’s also this slightly depressive side that drags you back down, while leaving you dreaming of getting out of there. It’s not a song after all, it’s instrumental music that I wanted to put there in the middle of this rather sad album.

And then it’s back to the most pop song on the album, “Baisers de Savoie”. In it, I remember this girl I kissed a very long time ago – before I met my wife, haha! The song recounts the warmth of such an episode in November, in a small town in Savoie.

And the last song, “La bouche”, is really about Montreal, where I’ve actually spent a lot of time over the past two years. I really enjoyed observing Montrealers women, who are much less uptight than Parisians – the latter are retreating a little into their more classical side in a rather negative French context at the moment.

PAN M 360: Adieu hiver isn’t a strictly electronic album: it also features guitar, pedal steel, bass, drums and more.

LOIG MORIN: Yes, my instrument of choice is the guitar. After that, I play the other instruments.

PAN M 360: So it’s not just electro, and even then, you’re looking for warm sounds.

LOIG MORIN: In fact, it’s essentially analog; for me, digital remains cold and instruments quickly become obsolete. So I’ve acquired Moog synths (among others), I have several electronic modules grouped together on a Eurorack, and so on.

PAN M 360: How long did you plan to complete this cycle of seasons?

LOIG MORIN: Initially, I wanted to do it all in a year and a half, but then I got tired and said no, I don’t feel like it right now. I was more interested in exploring new sounds and avoiding the “commercial” pressure of making the last of the four albums. We’ll see, I’ll leave it to that… but right now I want to explore new sounds. To that end, I’m building a mobile studio in a truck, and I want to travel the country with it, meeting unknown artists, recording them and making my own music. So I’d like to make a nature album with electronic sounds and other sounds recorded in the field.

PAN M 360: Clearly, you still have a lot of ground to cover!

Russian-Canadian composer Airat Ichmouratov will inaugurate the first opera produced under the banner of Nouvel Opéra Métropolitain (NOM), the new opera division of Festival Classica founded by Marc Boucher, with L’Homme qui rit, adapted from Victor Hugo’s novel by Bertrand Laverdure.

Featuring an all-Quebec cast including Hugo Laporte, Jean-François Lapointe, Janelle Lucyk, Sophie Naubert Magali Simard-Galdès, Florence Bourget, Antonio Figueroa and Boucher himself, this world premiere will be the first in a series of three opera premieres – Jules Massenet’s L’adorable Belboul on June 6th, and Théodore Dubois’s Miguela on June 14th. This marks the launch of a collaboration with the Salle Claude-Champagne of the Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Music for the next few years.

With Airat Ichmouratov and his production team in the home stretch before the premiere of L’Homme qui rit, we spoke to him.

PAN M 360 : Rehearsals for the performance of L’Homme qui rit have been underway for some time now. How are things going with the singers and musicians?

Airat Ichmouratov : I can say I’m really proud. We really have an extraordinary team. Everyone is so charismatic with great voices and a great attitude. Working with the Classica Festival and Marc Boucher, who has been so supportive from the start, and with all these musicians, is truly an incredible experience. We’ve already had a rehearsal with the orchestra. On Saturday we rehearsed with the singers, and after that we’ll have a dress rehearsal with everyone. The orchestra is excellent, the musicians are enthusiastic and excited about playing this new music. As a composer and conductor, it’s a real privilege to work with them.

PAN M 360 : On the one hand, to experience the world premiere of your first opera, and on the other, to be able to conduct it, must be extremely exciting, one imagines!

Airat Ichmouratov : Indeed, it’s something you don’t experience very often. It really brings to mind the old tradition of Richard Strauss or Gustav Mahler conducting their works. Nowadays, there aren’t many composers who conduct their works, although there are a few exceptions like John Adams. I’m really happy, because in my case I studied composition and conducting, and I’ve worked a lot as an opera conductor, particularly in Europe where I conducted several operas by Puccini Tchaikovsky and Verdi. I learned a lot from these works.

PAN M 360 : Tell us about the story behind L’Homme qui rit. What does it tell, and how did you come into contact with it and with Bertrand Laverdure, the librettist? 

Airat Ichmouratov : read this book by Victor Hugo when I was 16. It’s a rather complex book, and not an easy one, because Victor Hugo always gives a lot of descriptions of the social and political situation of his time, but the story itself is extraordinary. The first thing is a story of love transcending appearances between Gwynplaine, a disfigured man, and Dea, a blind girl who sees in him only the beauty of her soul. The other thing is a story that illustrates the difference between wealth and poverty, which are still very topical subjects. Also, and for me this is very touching, it’s a story about acrobats, street musicians. When I came to Canada 25 years ago, I was a street musician for 4 years. I couldn’t get a job as an international student, so playing in the street was my only way of earning money. The story of Gwynplaine touches me for these reasons.

It was Marc Boucher who introduced me to Bertrand Laverdure. When I met Marc, I said, “Why don’t you create a new opera? He asked me right away if I had a subject in mind, and I said, “Yes, I have a subject. He told me he knew an extraordinary poet who could be the librettist, and from that moment on, he introduced me to Bertrand. Over the course of a year, and right in the middle of COVID, we talked a lot, and Bertrand wrote a first version of the libretto for the summer of 2021. I can say it was a great experience to work with him because Bertrand is an author with a very emotional pen, which for me was a very important element. His words are very inspiring. We formed a very good tandem for two years and I think the result is very good. I’m very happy with it. We are already discussing a new opera based on a work by Honoré de Balzac, for the 2026 edition of the Classica Festival.

PAN M 360 : What were your musical inspirations for setting Bertrand Laverdure’s words to music?

Airat Ichmouratov : My musical language is really romantic music. For me, it’s always a challenge, because in Romantic music, so much has been said that today, you compose something and it sounds like what already exists. So you’re bound to hear a lot of inspiration from a number of Romantic composers I’ve heard and who have marked out my career as a conductor and composer. People often refer to my music as neo-romantic. There’s always a lot of emotion involved, because for me, that’s extremely important. When you listen to music, you have to feel something. It may not necessarily be a good feeling, it may be frustration, anger, but it’s absolutely important to feel it. Because when you listen to music and don’t feel anything, for me it’s a disaster. The feeling and the emotion have to be there.

The world premiere of L’Homme qui rit, an opera by Airat Ichmouratov to a libretto by Bertrand Laverdure, adapted from Victor Hugo’s work, takes place on Wednesday May 31, at 7:30 pm at Salle Claude-Champagne, as part of the Festival Classica. Tickets are available here.

Ky Brooks is a shining beacon in Montréal’s experimental music playground. Playing in past bands like Shining Wizard, Femmaggots, Lungbutter, and Nag, Ky also serves as the live sound person for Big|Brave, and house tech at mainstay Montréal indie venue La Sala Rossa. Ky was also a central co-conspirator at the pivotal and fertile DIY loft space La Plante throughout the 2010s, giving birth to much of Montreal’s newer burgeoning experimental artists.

During the pandemic, Ky had time to reflect on their own solo journey as an artist and then made the collaborative album, Power Is The Pharmacy—out now via the mighty, Constellation Records, along with 11 other musicians such as; Mat Ball, synth maven Nick Schofield, saxophonist James Goddard (Egyptian Cotton Arkestra), bassist Joshua Frank (Gong Gong Gong), drummer Farley Miller (Shining Wizard), and Andrés Salas (Bosque Rojo). Many of those musicians became part of Ky’s live band, and are giving a proper live debut with a mini three-date tour, including one date for Montreal’s experimental music festival, Suoni Per Il Popolo. We spoke with Ky, and saxophonist, James Goddard, ahead of the Suoni show.

PAN M 360: Hey Ky, so you must be in rehearsals for the Suoni show?

Ky Brooks: Yeah it’s actually me and the band on the line; James, Mathieu, Farley, and Rob. We’re playing in Toronto tomorrow. So we’re getting ready for that and then Ottawa the day after.

PAN M 360: Is it going to be mostly the new album, Power Is The Pharmacy?

Ky Brooks: It will be for those two dates, just all the new album. There are excluded, two of the more melodic songs. It’s a slightly different interpretation of it, I guess. Because there’s only one synth on stage. And there’s a ton of synths on the recordings.

PAN M 360: And I feel for this kind of music. There’s a huge amount of room for live improv?

Ky Brooks: Yeah for sure. And you know, the songs are so weirdly structured on the recordings so we’ve like found ways to structure them and maybe making sense for playing might feel a little bit more concise. But it’s still weird.

PAN M 360: Is it kind of like constant music too, with songs bleeding into each other?

James Goddard: We’ve only done the set once in December and I think we kind of designed it to be like a freight train.

PAN M 360: And Ky, how did you go about making this solo project, deviating from making music with full bands in the past?

Ky Brooks: It’s kind of funny, because the actual album has, so many people playing on it—like 11 different musicians play on it. And the folks here, with the exception of Rob, played on the record. I think it’s sort of this thing where like it would be amazing to have everybody in that whole group of people play, but it’s just too much to wrangle 11 people. I was just sort of thinking about how to put the music together live in such a way that we can cover all the bases, basically. And this is a group that ended up being chosen. And I’m sure there will be other configurations down the road. Honestly what happened is I did The Artist’s Way, which is this 12-step book course about reclaiming your creativity. It’s based on AA. So I did that deep into the pandemic and this album is kind of what came out. So I wasn’t really like, ‘I want to have a solo project thing’ at all. I prefer playing in groups and I like to improvise with people and you know, like pals and noise, that’s what I like. So doing this sort of like a self-directed thing, being isolated in the pandemic, I needed to be making something.

Ky by Stacy Lee

PAN M 360: And recording it, was it you bringing these skeletal structures of songs and having the musicians do what they do?

Ky Brooks: That’s definitely part of what happened. It’s kind of like a collage

James Goddard: Those initial recording sessions with Andrés and Nick, You’re like, ‘I have a page of words. And I have no idea what the music should be around the words.’ And we’re just like, OK ‘Let’s do a music’ and some of that stuff ended up on the album. And then others got erased and replaced by different stuff. You would send it to Farley and he would come with a drum beat. And then you would take out the saxophone or whatever and then put on a synth and then like the song. There was almost no scaffolding and it was really your process of assembling.

Ky Brooks: It’s interesting, I and Joni Void interviewed each other on CKUT last week and bonded over that very similar process of making music. Basically a collage from sound, right? So, I didn’t write some music. And then my friends played on it. It was more like, it just was assembled from the things that people were doing. And like what people sent to me or like, did in the moment, and there was a lot of taking things from one place and putting them somewhere else. And there’s field recordings and stuff like that on there, too, which I think is sort of, like an odd again, to that process of like assemblage.

PAN M 360: And now translating these songs live is another form of assemblage.

Ky Brooks: Yeah, I feel like we’re like a Nu Metal band live (laughs). For this live show, for example, Rob is playing the guitar on this and they didn’t play on the album. And they’re playing a bunch of parts that were originally synth parts, actually. So there’s the sort of reinterpretation that we’re doing of like, figuring out like, how to translate it live.

PAN M 360: I wanted to ask you about the lyrical verse, this almost fragmented poeticism. Do you write down your own interpretations in a journal daily?

Ky Brooks: Yeah, I mean, I do journal every day. But the material on Power Is The Pharmacy is mostly somewhat structured poems, which don’t have the form of what is on the album but are poems that I had sat on for a really long time. Like “Elven Silverware,” for example, is a poem that I think I have been performing live for, like, six years, at least in different configurations. You know, some and then some of them were just improvised during the recording, like “Dragons.” Like “The Dancer,” that’s definitely like, I wrote it as a song rather than as a poem. So there’s a lot of skipping around at this point. I’ve been working on this stupid thing for like, so fucking long that I just know it all pretty well. But I think you have kind of different vibes and different emotions with each song.

PAN M 360: Would you say that there’s a theme that holds the whole album together, or like maybe a few?

Ky Brooks: I can tell you the embarrassing truth about this album, which is that the original name of it was ‘Capitalism Dreams, and the Fear of Loss,’ which, of course, I could not keep as the name of the album. But those are the three themes of the album, and there’s actually sort of three different sets of—you could break it down into three different groups of songs, which are about these three different aspects. Sort of the underlying theme of the album, for me, is related to getting older and related to how ephemeral life is and how incredibly scary it is to exist, knowing that. And then sort of drawing a parallel between, the changing city, and how infrastructure and you know, like zoning laws, change how we experience our daily life, and the places that we live in and are in.

James Goddard: There’s also the quote that inspired the title. Should I read the quote? I’m going to read it. ‘Power Is the Pharmacy, thanks to its capacity to transform the sources of death into a seeding strength, or to convert the resources of death into the capacity for healing. And it is because of its dual ability to be the force of life and the principle of death that power is at once revered and feared…’

Ky Brooks: I mean, I feel like that’s that book, A Critique Of Black Reason by Achille Mbembe. And maybe more specifically, there’s another book by the same author called Necropolitics, which is how in capitalism, death becomes a source of power. Who is allowed to die and who’s forced to die becomes a tool for reinforcing or recreating capitalism, basically. Yeah. And that’s, I think, also one of the deep themes of the album. And, you know, sort of reading this author all scripts, and taking that quote at face value.

James Goddard: We like nerd shit in this band.

PAN M 360: Finally what do you think we can expect from the upcoming Suoni performance?

Ky Brooks: I mean my hope is that it’s just gonna be really fun, weird, stupid, Sotterranea vibes. We’re playing with their friends, HRT and Genital Shame, who are coming in from the States. And they’re an experimental queer black metal project.

PAN M 360: Experimental queer black metal? Man, only at Suoni.

KY + GENITAL SHAME + HRT @ LA SOTTERENEA, June 1st, 9 pm.
TICKETS HERE

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